The growing battle over Oakland’s valuable waterfront property development sharply escalated this week, with the coalition opposing the sale of the OUSD downtown properties moving their target from the powerless OUSD Board of Trustees to the powerful Oakland City Council and opponents of the massive nearby Oak-to-Ninth development filing a lawsuit against the project as well as launching a petition drive for a ballot measure to block its implementation.
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Councilmember Gordon Wozniak says getting the City Council involved in controversial student elections at UC Berkeley is council business as usual, but others say it is an attack on the independence of student government.
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They are everywhere, trying to grab our attention. And they succeed. Public opinion polls claim to adapt statistical research methods to the measuring of beliefs. Scientific? Perhaps, but polling also operates with hidden goals because it is part of the marketplace.
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Features

A proposed $3,000 donation on today’s (Tuesday) City Council agenda to Kitchen Democracy from Councilmember Gordon Wozniak’s council office budget has provoked questions on the appropriate use of city funds.
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Major repairs and renovations will keep alternating lanes closed on Piedmont Avenue for the next three weeks, said Kenneth Emeziem, supervising civil engineer for Berkeley’s Public Works Department.
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Berkeley relies on the Board of Library Trustees (BOLT) to safeguard its library system, and we, the citizens and taxpayers of Berkeley, along with the people who staff our libraries, should have some influence on their decisions.
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Columns

It’s a famous cartoon setup: Aliens descend from a space ship, walk up to a human, and demand, “Take me to your leader.” If aliens actually did land in Washington D.C., they’d probably be taken to meet George Bush. After all, he’s the nominally elected president of the United States. Ah, but is he our leader?
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I’m not a spokesperson for anyone, but myself. I once thought I might have some insights to share with and about the disabled community but this has turned out not to be true. When an organization that represents this community was looking for local authors to speak at a fundraising event, I imagined I was the perfect candidate.
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I just finished a book called Why Men Won’t Ask for Directions, which despite the title is not another pop-psychology tract about gender differences. The author, Richard Francis, is an evolutionary neurobiologist, and the book is a rousing polemic against the sociobiologists and their intellectual heirs, the evolutionary psychologists: scientists who believe that just about every aspect of human behavior is an adaptation to something or other.
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